Cecilia Bengolea and Christian Fennesz meet for the first time in Zagreb. Bengolea’s choreographic work (Pâquerette, Sylphides, Castor and Pollux) is known to inscribe mythology, both ancient and contemporary, in related symbolism and abstraction. Phoenix will be born from Fennesz and Bengolea’s encounter. It is meant to burn fiercely but also reduce to ashes: the bird’s cry is all but a beautiful song. Phoenix’s ability to be reborn from its own ashes implies it’s immortality, though in some stories new Phoenixes are merely the offspring of the older one.

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Cecilia Bengolea originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, based in Paris. Initiated herself in Anthropological Dance as well as in modern-jazz and ballet. She followed studies at the University of History of Art and Philosophy in Buenos Aires. Her choreographic work is presented in many international venues. In 2004, she attended to ex.er.c.e, Centre Chorégraphique de Montpellier. Since then, Bengolea performs with Claudia Triozzi, Marc Tompkins, Yves-Nöel Genod, collaborates with Joris Lacoste, Alain Buffard, Alice Chauchat, Mathilde Monnier. She closely collaborates with François Chaignaud; Pâquerette (2005), Sylphides (2008), Castor et Pollux (2009), Free dance of François Malkovski (2010), (M)imosa (2011); together with Marlene Freitas, Trajal Harrel. She created Umbrae Procella, concert with Luvinsky Atche in 2009-10. Cecilia Bengolea and François Chaignaud received the Award of the Critic in Paris 2009 for their choreographic work; Pâquerette and Sylphides.

Austrian guitarist, composer and electronic musician Christian Fennesz is recognized as the key figure and one of the most distinctive voices of electronic music today. His wide international reputation has been consolidated through a substantial overall contribution to the new musical expression. He started his career as the member of the group Maische, one of the most interesting bands of Viennese underground scene during the late eighties. With the beginning of nineties Fennesz became involved with Viennese techno scene. From the very beginning, he was displaying talent for composing and developing his own sound world and the distinctive idiom made possible by technology. Although Fennesz has been educating formaly since an early age, first in guitar later in ethno-musicology, he decided to look for his own musical goal in the world where he could belong, expressing himself as a composer and performer. He maintained guitar as a dominant musical source changing the conventional usage and features by plugging it into laptop. Combining these musical tools as well as developing his own style in transforming and processing it, Christian Fennesz managed to create a specific expression and sound world that is difficult to mistake for another. Milestone of Fennesz’s career, the album Endless summer (2001, Mego) is acknowledged as one of the most important releases of the decade that helped changing of perception and position of electronic music today. In the times when composers of improvised and experimental music had tended almost to negate basic musical components, Fennesz has given significant place to melody in his own pieces. Growing unexpectedly into the music, the melody is delicatly appearing beneath (or on the top) of shimmering electronic sound often described as symphonic for its enormous range and complex musicality. In 2004 Fennesz presented album Venice where he brought to the full extension combination of ambience rich sound textures combined with pop-song elements – started from the most obvious one as track length, to the more hidden as structure itself. The last solo release Black sea (2008) has proved to be bold step towards experimenting with longer tracks that tend to fuse or to be perceived as a complex structure, outlining and constructing sonic space without necessarily filling it with musical narrative and predefined concept. Within last ten years, Fennesz had made collaboration with many other musicians as well with authors whose creative field stretch form video art and film to dance. These encounters of diverse poetics had resulted with numerous stage performances and number of exceptional studio releases. He had been recording and performing with Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, Keith Rowe, Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse), Mike Patton and many others. Fennesz has also worked alongside Peter Rehberg and Jim O’Rourke in the improvisational trio Fenn O’Berg.

This Kriegspiel presents all 55 diagramms of the moves drawn in the Game of War by Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho, subtitled as “a list of succeeding positions of all forces during the game”. What we perform is a represantion of war: „Ludimus effigiem belli“.

[That army], which relished battle (rasāhavā), contained allies who brought low the bodes and gaits of their various striving enemies (sakāranānārakāsakāyasādadasāyakā), and in it the cries of the best of mounts contended with musical instruments (vāhasāranādavādadavādanā).

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Damir Bartol Indoš, was born in 1957 in Zagreb. He was one of the main members of the influential neo-avant-garde performance troupe Theatre Kugla / Kugla Glumište and co-created and performed in many of the groups projects. During the 1980′s – as a pioneer of ‘hard faction’ theatre – DB Indoš created a series of performances with Group Kugla. Then, as DB Indoš House of Extreme Music Theater, from the 1990s, he created a series of projects and world tours with a variety of foreign and domestic artists and musicians (including Elliott Sharp, Charles Gayle, Helge Hinteregger, Zlatko Burić, Henning Fremann, Pere Motion Yorgens, Nicole Hewitt, Vilim Matula, Ana Karić , Tanja Vrvilo, Emil Matešić, Irma Omerzo and Selma Banich).Since 2005, in coproduction with Culture of Change, he has been making performances in collaboration with the actress and film curator Tanja Vrvilo which connect the performance styles of alternative performers, actors, dancers and musicians.

Architectonic spaces, spaces of remembrance, emotional spaces, spaces of sound – somewhere in, through and between these we are said to be living. In their performance “wall / paper / wall”, Antje Velsinger and Markus Popp construct several layers of inward and outward textures of space. The layers overlap and tilt, a space of possibilities of individual as well as collective experience emerges.

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Antje Velsinger is a freelance performer and choreographer, currently studying at the Master-course „Choreography and Performance“ in Gießen.Central to her work is the understanding that the choreographic practice is a research process, in which new knowledge develops during experiencing the posted questions.

Ever since his first groundbreaking album releases, Markus Popp aka “oval” continues to be one of the most prolific and influential forces in contemporary electronic music – a laptop legend and true visionary of digital audio. Popp’s now legendary early album releases sent shockwaves though the electronic music landscape and laid the foundations for an entire new class of digital sound & production aesthetics. With an undeniable instinct for the pleasantly irritating, the drastic and the dreamy, Popp pioneered “glitch” and “clicks & cuts” – inspiring and provoking a new generation of music producers to this day.

The raw, yet strangely organic appeal of many of Popp’s albums are regarded as watershed moments for the entire genre. Many of his tracks and remixes have been described as timeless, haunting classics, earning him critical acclaim worldwide – as well as the occasional art award here and there. He has toured extensively, rocking out on all sorts of stages of all sizes between Auckland, New Zealand and the Roskilde Festival. Popp has constantly refined his signature style and instantly recognizable aesthetics in several collaborations, most notably with the long-running projects MICROSTORIA (duo with Mouse On Mars-legend Jan St. Werner) and SO (with Japanese songwriter extraordinaire Eriko Toyoda). Popp has also worked for/with: BJÖRK, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, TORTOISE, MOUSE ON MARS, SQUAREPUSHER, PIZZICATO 5, GASTR DEL SOL etc.

Fast-forward to 2010. With the “Oh” EP and the double CD “O”, oval opens up a new chapter with a surprise move: this striking, 101-track extravaganza is a radical departure – challenging music on its’ own turf. Out of nowhere, Popp debuts as a producer of unexpected versatility far beyond the electronic music arena. “o” is a wild ride – from delicate, sophisticated pop vignettes to brutally torn, electro-acoustic riffing full of angular, colliding guitar work, accompanied by “free” drumming that evolves organically over the course of a track. This new oval sound is a celebration of a new level of skill & sensibility in contemporary music: handcrafted polyrhythmic phrases, riffs and structures, bristling with tiny resonances & detail – adding up to timeless tunes which are effortlessly traversing rhythms, scales and harmonies. But despite the picturesque, accessible “songwriter 2.0” trappings, this record is no revisionist, kitschy “love letter to music”, i is a 2010 hi-tech product.

Popp has also made several interactive and software-based works. “Ovalprocess”, a custom interactive sound platform/installation powered by his custom-made audio software, has been exhibited worldwide, for example in the Centre Pompidou, Chicago’s Cultural Center or the K21, the NRW state museum in Düsseldorf – as well as in many other national museums, art spaces & galleries around the world (Barcelona, Berlin, Karlsruhe, New York , Tokyo etc). Popp’s outspoken, yet constructive digital media critique is razor-sharp just as much as it is entertaining. Over the course of many lectures, workshops and presentations he has shared his creative vision – with topics ranging from “alternative workflows in time-based media” to his very own flavor of contemporary video game discourse; advocating a perspective on media productivity that simply does not cease to challenge conventions.

Burkhard Schlothauer: John Cage: Nine
zeitkratzer have played Cage on many occasions and in 2010 they have released a critically acclaimed CD “zeitkratzer [old school] John Cage”. Allthough John Cage had never composed a piece for nine instruments, Burkhard Schlothauer had an idea to arrange Seven² for zeiktratzer – one of those beautiful late Numberpieces of Cage. Cage had composed his Numberpieces using aleatoric technique, applied on specific parameters. The compositional process was mainly guided by the selection of a possible compositional material, which was then structured by chance operations. Afterwards it was an easy task to transcribe this material into musical score. Schlothauer as a musicologist has been intensively researching Numberpieces and in almost all of them he was able to find the initial point, ie. the material structured by chance operations and the its aleatoric distributions. A reverse method was made possible that way: though Cage is dead, his compositional machine can again be put to work. Burkhard Schlothauer did exactly this and he has written a new score by Cage – Nine – for zeitkratzer. The authorship has been left unclear: while the usage of Cage’s methods makes it unmistakenably a work by Cage, Schlothauer has written it down and produced the score.

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Aus den Sieben Tagen
“Aus den Sieben Tagen” was written by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1972, immediately after his return from California. The only determined part of the piece are textual instructions – pitch, rhythm and other elements are not fixed. The composer gives instead rather plain instructions: “play the vibration of the universe” or “play your own vibration”. Being obviously a sound-piece it occupies a singular position in Stockhausen’s œuvre. Vibration means that during a single piece just a few notes or sounds can be played, but with a huge importance given to them by the musicians. A minimalist music of highest subjectivity is thus being created, where the best possible outcome is the moment when musicians identify themselves with specific sounds. Though it took them a long time, finally this piece will be premiered by zeitkratzer.

SONGS
At first glance, it is surprising that zeitkratzer do SONGS. Are they not a New Music Ensemble, or are they a bunch of noise-makers? And now: songs? A project that was kicked off by a fashion-show several years ago where zeitkratzer played the music and Marc Weiser (a.k.a. rechenzentrum) sang. Weiser was at the time already known for his Mark Markowitch project, singing in fake-languages his fake-songs in Berlin-pubs… A nice farewell from Pop – back to authentic Lied, in between orchestral intensity and minimalist soundscapes. SONGS!

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zeitkratzer was founded in 1999. Its concept of a European soloists ensemble is unique worldwide. The nine musicians, the light and the sound engineer live in different European cities from Vienna via Amsterdam to London and meet for working phases at Berlin. Here, new projects are developed – in recent years as a steady guest of the Volksbühne Berlin.

zeitkratzer finances itself through free projects and international concerts and thus is independant of institutional investors. This freedom allowed idiosyncratic and pathbreaking programs that made zeitkratzer internationally recognized. The repertoire comprises works and projects by and with such different musicians as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lou Reed, Carsten Nicolai, John Cage, Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, James Tenney, Helmut Oehring, La Monte Young, Merzbow, Alvin Lucier, … as well as many interdisciplinary cooperations.

zeitkratzer has realized all those projects with different musicians and artists without ever worrying about preserving the “purity” of new music. Music, especially so-called new music, thrives on continuous contamination. The idea of „pure taste“ as an independent aesthetic category was revealed by Pierre Bourdieu to be a medium of social distinction. “Thus, pure taste is based on nothing else but a rejection or rather disgust for the objects that ‘force us to enjoy’, such as disgust for such crude, vulgar taste that is also appealing in this forced enjoyment.“ (Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction)

zeitkratzer benefits from its musicians, their advanced and unique playing techniques, their acquaintance with electronics and technologies, their hybrid experience backgrounds: new or improvised music, experimental Rock and Pop, Noise, Ambient, Folk Music, … Meanwhile, the awards range from the German Jazz Award (Frank Gratkowski) via a fellowship at the Kings College Cambridge (Anton Lukoszevieze) to a composition commission by the French state (Reinhold Friedl).

Tours brought zeitkratzer to many European countries, zeitkratzer regularly performs at renowned festivals from Madrid, Rome or London to Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. Meanwhile there is more than ten record releases, many important European broadcasting stations have recorded and broadcasted their concerts. With zeitkratzer RECORDS there now exists an own record label.